Video first

The video can be seen here at Station B. If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s the text version.

Word version

Shout. Being questioned again.

A few days ago, I posted an article advertising my Advanced Android course, which mentioned that my monthly income has increased 10-fold twice since graduation.

A friend directly questioned the following, satire I boast not rough draft.

He was actually right. When I graduated, I was making 2200 yuan a month. If I were 100 times, I would be making 220,000 yuan a month now, but I wasn’t. For example, last month, I was making… 400000.


The text start

Hi, I’m Zhu Kai from throwline.

Since the last AD went out, people have been curious about this double 10x in the comments, so I’m going to take my shirt off and show it to you. I will tell you all about my journey from graduation to the present, my experience, my growth, and the changes in my income. In addition, I will also do an analysis of what is replicable and what is not replicable, and HOPEFULLY that will be useful to you.

Bank of outsourcing

I graduated in 2011, when I just graduated, I went to a bank outsourcing company to do Java development, the monthly salary of 2200. At that time, I could do nothing but follow the example of the elder brother with the project, and I was not even very clear about the meaning of each field. After doing a month, I was sent to Weihai on business from Zhengzhou. During the business trip, I still copied and pasted with the project manager every day. Besides playing games in my spare time, I used my mobile phone every day, playing various software and constantly swiping it. In fact, I started swiping and changing my mobile phone when I was in college. You love playing with phones so much, why don’t you go into mobile development, and you said Android was written in Java?

Independent development

Just do it! The next day, I told the company to resign. More than a month later, at the beginning of 2012, I left home after working for half a year and started the second stage of my career: entrepreneurship. Yes, I do not do two endlessly this time, full of confidence to go home to start a lone business programmer. I made my first App while learning Android development at home. I told my wife, “Just wait, soon I’ll be making $2,000 a month just from this app!” The software is released, and the monthly income it brings me is… 0.

I was devastated, but my wife said to me, “It’s okay, optimize it!”

Ok, optimize! A year later, my monthly income is still 0.

Beijing to work

To see me unhappy, my wife said: “Why don’t you go to Beijing to work, see how those companies are making products, and then come back to work.”

Good!

The next day I took the train to Beijing to look for work with a schoolbag on my back. This was the beginning of 2013, when I was at my most confident. I thought to myself that I could develop software independently, but Tencent and Baidu would not let me choose. However, the fact is that all the resumes I have applied for, big or small, have received no response, not to mention Tencent and Baidu. And then I started throwing. What is the sea throw method? I searched for “Android” positions on job boards every Monday morning and sent them out in batches, applying for more than 1,000 positions at a time. Even so, I only get three or four interview requests a week. What’s worse, I failed all of these interviews. As my money dwindled, I became increasingly anxious. Fortunately, when my one-month rental was about to expire, I finally found a company willing to hire me. This was my first job in Beijing and my monthly salary was 7,000 yuan.

After I found a job, I rented a house. I rented a shabby small clapboard room near my company, 1400 yuan per month, much more expensive than the super-large bungalow my classmates rented in Changping for 500 yuan, but I was very satisfied with it, because it was close to my company.

In fact, I’ve had three jobs in Beijing over the years, and each time I changed jobs I rented a new apartment near my company. How close is this “near”? This first job was the farthest I’d ever rented, but it was a 12-minute bike ride; Most recently, I almost moved downstairs to my office, which is a 5-minute walk away. By always renting near my office rather than in a low-rent suburb, I seem to be spending more money and living less comfortably. But I think being close to the company allowed me to grow quickly because I didn’t have to waste my time and energy on the road. With the time and energy saved, I can use it for living and learning to improve.

Continued. When I got to work, I realized, ah yā, business projects are so complicated, so difficult, what I used to make was a toy. I felt a lot of pressure, so I had to study harder, learning all kinds of things I didn’t know before and couldn’t do. Eventually, I adapted to the company’s development standards for such “business projects” and gradually became the main force of the team. At that time, my pressure was finally reduced, and I also began to learn to write technical blog in my spare time, from translating English documents to writing original works, slowly exploring.

Changing jobs for the first time

A year later, at the beginning of 2014, I was recommended by a friend to join another startup company and my salary rose to 12,000 yuan. My wife finally moved to Beijing to join me. After joining this company, an event that has a great impact on my life happened: my wife is pregnant. Although the baby will still be born in half a year, my pressure and motivation came first. So I gave up playing games for more than ten years, and I worked and studied every day. I arrive at the office at 7 in the morning and work until 11 at night, and when I’m done I study or write articles. During this time, I wrote my first slightly influential article on the Dagger library.

Do you remember why I came to Beijing? I’m here to learn product ideas so I can go back and start my own business, right? But slowly, I changed my mind. I already love technology and love programs, and I don’t want to start a business.

After more than half a year of efforts by my colleagues and I, at the end of 2014, our company announced that… Closed down.

At that time, my wife had already returned to Zhengzhou to give birth, and I didn’t rush to find a job because I wanted to go home to accompany the birth. Instead, I studied in a rented room in Beijing for two months. During the two months, I wrote the first open source library in my life — MaterialEditText. When I finished it, I posted it to Google Plus. A day later, I got 100 stars, which made me very happy. You should know that the star in 2014 is completely different from now. At that time, no one had to brush the number of stars. 100 stars a day is very many. Now the star of this project has reached more than 6000, but the 100 that impressed me most at the beginning.

A few days later, I was told that my library was being used by Flipboard in a very special way. One of their staff found some bugs in my library and came to me to fix them. Flipboard is a world famous app that uses my library! I was happy again. After working with him online to fix the bug, I packed up and went back to Zhengzhou to wait for the baby to be born.

Join Fipboard

One night, I got an email inviting me to Flipboard. It turned out that the guy who fixed my bugs recommended me, so The Beijing office of Flipboard emailed me to ask if I was interested. After several rounds of remote interviews, I got an offer from Flipboard. My salary this time is more than 20,000 yuan, which is about 10 times more than when I just graduated.

Then my baby was born, and I stayed home for less than a month before I took the train back to Beijing to start my first and last job with a foreign company.

Learning English masochistically

Originally, I thought that technology has no borders, even if I joined a foreign company, with my technical level, I should have no problem working here, maybe even walk sideways. However, I was assigned to a project with Samsung, and my product manager was Korean, and we needed to communicate in English. However, due to my poor English, our communication at work was not smooth. I got up at 4am and studied English for four or five hours before going to work. After four months of uninterrupted study, I was able to communicate with my Korean colleagues. These four months, really, have been hard. But it turned out, really, great.

First speech

After joining Flipboard, I did my first public speaking. GDG in Beijing was holding a technology sharing meeting at that time, and I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to share the technology I learned with others, but as an unknown technical person, I knew GDG could not invite me actively, so… I reached out to the organizers. Then I got invited to speak at GDG. I was well aware that the invitation was not for my self-recommendation, but for the halo Flipboard gave me.

I’ve been working on this speech for a long time. Not to mention the preparation, just rehearsal, I spent a week of spare time. During the week leading up to the speech, I rehearsed my speech over and over in my pajamas at home every night, with my wife as the only audience. I rehearsed my awkward speech in front of her for a week, she helped me point out what I was saying wrong, I blushed as I absorbed her advice, and then told her all over again.

The subsequent speech was a success. After MY last sentence, I heard the applause very loud.

The speech had a great influence on me. It planted a seed in my heart.

Make a speech in English

After the speech in Beijing, our team went on a business trip to the HEADQUARTERS in the United States. We needed to make a presentation to our colleagues in the United States and tell them about the recent work achievements in China. When I was about to start, my eldest brother pulled me and whispered: Zhu Kai, you can speak. I know you are the worst at English among us, but I think you are the best.

I was strangely confident and a little excited about the challenge. As soon as I got the microphone, my whole body seemed to be activated, Blabla began to speak. And so finished I just a little trance: huh? My English is so good? What did I just say?

RxJava Details

Flipboard has taught me a lot and I’ve grown a lot, but you know I’m not on Flipboard anymore. I left Flipboard in the middle of 2016, but I left at the end of 2015.

In 2015, RxJava was one of the most famous words in Android. Many people say it works, but many more say it doesn’t. I started using RxJava in 2014, and I knew why it worked, why people couldn’t learn it, and what the difficulties were, so I decided to write a full introduction to RxJava.

To make sure the article was easy to understand and absorb, I not only spent a few weeks writing it, but also “beta tested” it with dozens of online readers, including one of the RxJava project maintainers at the time. The so-called internal test is to send the article to these people in private first, and let them try to understand, and if THERE are any mistakes in my writing. After several rounds of reading and comments from enthusiastic readers, the RxJava For Android Developers was finally released in September 2015. As soon as the article was published, it became a must-read document for many teams using RxJava in China.

Then in November, I gave another talk about RxJava at GDG’s annual DevFest in Beijing. At that time, in the lecture theatre of Beihang University, the audience looked up at me in complete silence. The audience laughed when I talked about the jokes I had designed; As I moved on to the next sentence, the room fell silent again, and I thought to myself: I really am useful to them.

After this incident, I began to think: since my articles and speeches are really useful to everyone, I should do more. So how do we do that? All I can think of is writing an article or Posting a video about the skills and weaknesses common to Android engineers. But when I actually laid it all out, I realized that it was so big that I couldn’t do it full-time. And if it’s full-time, it means I lose my paycheck. Asking me to give up my job and focus on shining a light on people is frankly a bit beyond my capacity to contribute, and I don’t think I’m that great. So I dropped the whole thing.

Home business

But this renunciation… Is false. I didn’t give up.

Over the next few months, I started thinking differently: How about… Full time just full time? Free and charge content do not go, do not have money? It looks like there’s a solution, but it’s not as simple as just charging for it. Because once I quit, the nature of things changed: it stopped being my hobby and passion, it became my job at the same time, it became my sole source of income. The biggest problem, then, is the risk of failure. You may be watching me do it now, but at the time, it was really something that looked like a big failure. If you think back to the 2016 throwline, how many articles were written, how many speeches were made? What about online education in 2016? Even, right now, how many entrepreneurs are there in my form? It’s a really risky thing to do.

But I want to do it. I want to control it.

When I hesitated, my wife made a decision for me: resign.

And then I quit. Before leaving, my colleagues talked to me one by one. In addition to the affirmation and blessing, several angel investments were placed in front of me. I haven’t even thought about a profit plan yet, so I can’t ask for the money, but I feel the warmth.

After I quit my job in 2016, I packed my bags and went back to Zhengzhou to concentrate on my technology sharing. It took me a year to prepare for what was supposed to be four to six months.

On July 3, 2017, HenCoder, my technology sharing project, was officially released. On the day of the release, my wechat official account attracted 3,000 followers.

In early June 2018, two years after I left, my paid course, HenCoder Plus, was launched. Due to the lack of experience in opening the first class, I was afraid that there would be various problems due to too many students, so I limited the number of applicants to 100. The 100 places were filled in less than 3 days. I hadn’t decided on a platform yet, so I used the cheesiest one-to-one transfer method. I was a little surprised when I saw the students transferring hundreds of thousands of tuition fees to my wechat, Alipay and bank card.

I haven’t been paid for almost two years.

Throwing line School

Even though I had been cooped up at home for two years, and had done a lot of preparation, the first class had all sorts of rollovers because OF my lack of actual teaching experience. Looking at everyone not only not angry, but also to comfort me, my heart is complicated: one side is very hit, I have done so much careful preparation, still can not do perfect; While thinking, fortunately limited to 100 people, these 100 should be the most trust my fans; But at the same time, I felt that the group of people who trusted me the most had become my guinea pigs. Was it really a wise decision?

The final effect is still good, there is a monkey anxious students have not half with the previous several classes to teach the knowledge of the network into Ctrip. In fact, I think if he goes to find a job after studying, maybe Ctrip can offer him more. After the course, there were several students who went to Tencent to report good news.

Then, our team, The Throwing Line School, was officially established. We constantly optimized every aspect of the course, and I also continued to make public technical videos simultaneously. But slowly, we ran into another problem: the line between monetization and sharing. Whether the best content is in the open video or in the course is a question. Under the principle of maximum benefit, I definitely want to put good things in the course; But if you do that… That’s why I quit my job to go home in the first place? I was back to my old “share or make money” choice, and this time, I couldn’t be capricious: I had a team, a bunch of people who made money and ate with me.

It was a real conundrum and we couldn’t thrash it out. The final solution was hammered out over the course of two years. Now we have a basic model: public video is responsible for spot-blasting some key difficulties; The course is more comprehensive and systematic teaching, with more detailed and in-depth content to connect the knowledge points into a complete technical tree. In other words, if you are willing to entrust yourself to me, I can take you hand in hand to get the most improvement in the shortest time; And if you don’t want to spend money, just pay attention to me, and I can help you break through the toughest bottlenecks. Although there is still a gap in profitability with the route suggested to us by industry experts, it has reached a balance that we are relatively satisfied with.

At this point, my monthly income was already 100 times what IT had been when I graduated.

By the way, I’ve also taken advantage of the public sharing I’ve done over the years to become an official Google development expert in both Android and Kotlin, aka GDE. Heh heh, proud!

Then the code on school, that is, kaixue.io, we all know.

conclusion

That’s kind of how it’s been over the years. It’s kind of satisfying to be able to turn my hobby into a career, and help a lot of people, and… And I made money. There were a lot of bumps along the way, but it’s finally getting smoother. Looking back, I’ve summarized some of the key factors that made it this far. Some of these factors are replicable and some are not, but I have listed them in the hope that they will be useful to you.

  • First of all, I like to focus on my own growth and the future, not just the present. Like renting a house, I care more about time than saving money. This is replicable.
  • Then, I kept on learning and immediately went to make up for my shortcomings: technology, English, teaching, learning what is missing, whatever comes to me. This, too, is replicable.
  • In addition, I adhere to the principle of careful and prudent work: rehearse the speech over and over again, ask internal test readers to help review the article, and limit the number of students in the first class. This, too, is replicable.
  • There are also things that cannot be replicated, such as family support. I don’t think I could have done this without my wife’s unconditional support.
  • Also, to be fair, I did learn technology faster than a lot of people. This is also not replicable.
  • There’s another key ingredient that can’t be duplicated: love. I really love developing and sharing. Without that love, I wouldn’t be motivated to keep doing so much. But love it, because it can’t be copied. You can’t force yourself to share as much as I do, but you can do what you love. You might be thinking, can I make this much money doing what I love? Guys, I wanted to share because I love sharing, but because sharing doesn’t pay, I figured out how to share and earn money. By contrast, in 2016, a skilled programmer giving up his job to teach online doesn’t seem like a sensible choice. Not to mention 2016, even with the rise of online education, would you choose that now?

Speaking of passion, I would like to reveal a dream that I have not dared to make public, which I have only told my wife: I want to do my best to improve the level of the entire Android community in China. I am not there yet, far from it, but what I can see is that I am finally on the way to it.

Well, that’s all for today. If you like my video, welcome to follow the favorites to share the message. I’m a throwline. I don’t compete with you. I just help you grow. See you next time!